listener.co.nz has had an overwhelming reaction to the news that the musical Six is coming to Auckland to headline the region’s art festival. Here Chelsea Dawson, who portrays one of Henry VIII’s ex-wives, talks about the heartwarming reaction from fans.
Chelsea Dawson knew she wanted to audition for the musical Six even before she left drama school. She’d already been listening to the soundtrack on Spotify for a couple of years before there was talk of the award-winning UK musical coming to Australia.
“The show kept popping up on my suggested songs,” says Dawson. “As soon as I heard them, I was like, ‘What is this musical?’ It was so different from what I was used to hearing from classic musical theatre.”
And Six is different. Frequently described as the Spice Girls meets Hamilton, it clocks in at just 80 minutes, is nearly completely “sung through”, meaning there’s scant dialogue, and reimagines the six unfortunate wives of Tudor king Henry VIII as influential pop stars dressed in fantastical costumes to match their fiercely feminist attitudes.
Rather than being overshadowed by an abusive and tyrannical husband, the women are centre stage, telling their life stories from their points of view. There’s even a number called Ex-wives, where they speculate on what they might have become had they been alive today.
Headlining the 2025 Te Ahurei Toi o Tāmaki Auckland Arts Festival, Six is likely to attract a good number of mainstream musical fans.
“Not only are we celebrating these 500-year-old queens and the lives they led, but we’re also celebrating ourselves at the same time,” says Dawson, who plays Catherine Howard, Henry VIII’s fifth wife. “I think that’s also another thing that attracts audiences, because it’s a celebration of just being you and having the power and agency to write your own story.
“We’ve got some musicals that are led by strong women, such as Wicked, but to see something where it’s just six women on stage, with a band also made up of women, and they’re reclaiming their stories, tearing out the pages from the history books and retelling it their way, I found it so inspiring – and audiences do, too.”
Suffice to say Six isn’t a conventional history lesson, but it has made history by being one of the first musicals that fans have widely used social media to promote.
Six fans are now so numerous that there’s a collective noun, the Queendom, to describe them, and they’ve driven some impressive numbers: the musical has 1.5 million followers on social media and has had more than 32 million views on TikTok; the original studio cast recording has been certified gold and this album and SIX: Live on Opening Night (Original Broadway Cast Recording) have a combined streaming figure of more than 1 billion.
In early 2019, when Dawson first heard the songs and wanted to know more, she discovered the YouTube videos, the fan forums and the social-media postings of “Mega Six”, the encore song – a mash-up of six queens’ songs – that fans can record live (but not in North America, where it’s against actor union regulations).
“Oh, I was definitely part of the Queendom,” says Dawson, who now receives fan art from other Queendom members. “The fan art is incredible. Seeing my face drawn is weird, but very, very heartwarming.”
So, too, is meeting the show’s younger fans.
“You come out of the stage door and they’re waiting for you and looking at you like you’ve changed [the world] for them and there’s this twinkle in their eyes.
“It’s probably the best part of this job. You get to see six uniquely different women standing in one line, sharing this power and energy, and we are linked, not ranked. It’s something the cast talks about a lot, that we shine brighter together.”
Dawson says because the musical celebrates friendship, fans now make and swap friendship bracelets, à la Taylor Swift. Oddly, though, Swift is not one of the contemporary divas believed to have inspired the various queens.
Australian co-producer Louise Withers says the online access to fans has allowed Six to go global far sooner than it might otherwise have done, and the fact that it was written by two 23-year-olds goes some way to explaining its multiplatform life.
The story of the show’s creation, which is now the stuff of musical theatre legend, goes that in 2016, British composer Toby Marlow was tasked with writing the Cambridge University show for the 2017 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Needing to pull something together quickly, he was in a poetry class doing a comparative analysis of contemporary and 19th-century poems when he hit on the idea of reimagining Henry VIII’s wives as contemporary music stars.
Marlow, who identifies as transgender, called his friend and fellow composer Lucy Moss. Marlow wanted complex characters performing songs of many music styles with witty and wicked lyrics.
They roped in friends and family, including Marlow’s sister, Annabel, for the original Edinburgh production. It sold out and was invited back in 2018. But first, it was performed in Cambridge and seen by West End producer Kenny Wax.
Cue a brief run in the West End, a short UK tour, a return to the West End, open-ended seasons on Norwegian Cruise Line ships, a US tour before a Broadway opening, Canadian, Australian and South Korean productions and now, new productions announced for Singapore, the Philippines and Japan. The show that comes to New Zealand for the Auckland Arts Festival is the second Australian production.
Marlow, Moss and Six now have some 35 major international awards, including two Tony Awards for Best Original Score and Best Costume Design, and a Grammy nomination for Best Musical Theatre Album. Moss is the youngest female to direct a Broadway musical in more than 40 years.
When Dawson tried to see the original Australia production in Sydney in early 2020, it was sold out. Then, in her final year at the Queensland Conservatorium-Griffith University, she had successfully auditioned for the Six tour to replace one of the Australian cast.
“But the day I tried on the costume and had a physio check was the day Broadway turned off its lights and theatre – you know why – shut down for a bit,” she says.
It was nearly two years before Dawson got to play Catherine Howard.
“I had been working so hard for this dream, and then the industry was telling me that I was ready, but the world kind of said I wasn’t, but I’m grateful for that time, because I would have been just 20 when I started …”
Which is two years older than Catherine Howard was when she was beheaded at the Tower of London in February, 1542.
Musical muses
Six includes pop, rock, hip-hop and a power ballad so that each queen has her own sound – and look. These are based on the spirit and style of contemporary pop icons. Jackson McHenry, a theatre critic for vulture.com, broke it down like this:
Setting the queens to music
Six isn’t the first musical interpretation of the six wives of Henry VIII. There have been operas, concept albums and novelty songs charting the lives and deaths of the spouses, with various degrees of seriousness.
As happened in many of the screen adaptations, Anne Boleyn has been the most prominent. She had an Italian opera or two to her name in the 19th century. Gaetano Donizetti’s Anna Bolena debuted in Milan in 1830 and the work had a late 20th-century revival (Dame Kiri Te Kanawa sang it early in her London career) and regular outings in recent decades.
The first solo album by progressive rock keyboardist and star session player Rick Wakeman was 1973′s The Six Wives of Henry VIII, an LP that was meant to include a track about his royal highness as well. But after Wakeman recorded his compositions about the wives, he had no room left on the LP for the ode to Henry. Still, that didn’t stop it selling in the millions.
In 2009, Wakeman finally got his wish – denied at release time – to perform the album in its entirety at Hampton Court Palace, which was filmed, complete with orchestral backing, narration by Brian Blessed, and six actresses depicting the queens. None of the Wakeman songs were quite as catchy as the ones in Six, but if you want to hear the wives’ lives celebrated in five-minute synthesiser solos, here’s the place.
And when it comes to songs, even though it’s not really about him,
Henry VIII was the inspiration for the musical hall ditty I’m Henery the Eighth, I Am, which became a US No 1 hit for Herman’s Hermits in the 1960s. Again, it was Anne Boleyn who was enshrined in a song, With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm, a grim comedy number originally written in the 1930s and revived in the 1960s by the likes of the Kingston Trio and the Barron Knights.